“This is merely the foyer, Rita,” he said, smiling slightly.  “The state apartments are upstairs and in the adjoining house.”

“Oh,” she murmured—­and no more.

Kilfane and Mollie Gretna were passing through the inner doorway, and Mollie turned.

“Isn’t it loathsomely delightful?” she cried.

“Smartest leg in Buenos Ayres!” shrieked the raven.  “Sin Sin, Sin Sin!”

Uttering a frightened exclamation, Mollie disappeared along the passage.  Sir Lucien indicated to Rita that she was to follow; and he, passing through last of the party, closed the door behind him.

Sin Sin Wa never moved, and the raven, settling down upon the Chinaman’s shoulder, closed his serviceable eye.

CHAPTER XVII

THE BLACK SMOKE

Up an uncarpeted stair Cyrus Kilfane led the party, and into a kind of lumber-room lighted by a tin oil lamp and filled to overflowing with heterogeneous and unsavory rubbish.  Here were garments, male and female, no less than five dilapidated bowler hats, more tea-chests, broken lamps, tattered fragments of cocoanut-matting, steel bed-laths and straw mattresses, ruins of chairs—­the whole diffusing an indescribably unpleasant odor.

Opening a cupboard door, Kilfane revealed a number of pendent, ragged garments, and two more bowler hats.  Holding the garments aside, he banged upon the back of the cupboard—­three blows, a pause, and then two blows.

Following a brief interval, during which even Mollie Gretna was held silent by the strangeness of the proceedings,

“Who is it?” inquired a muffled voice.

“Cy and the crowd,” answered Kilfane.

Thereupon ensued a grating noise, and hats and garments swung suddenly backward, revealing a doorway in which Mrs. Sin stood framed.  She wore a Japanese kimona of embroidered green silk and a pair of green and gold brocaded slippers which possessed higher heels than Rita remembered to have seen even Mrs. Sin mounted upon before.  Her ankles were bare, and it was impossible to determine in what manner she was clad beneath the kimona.  Undoubtedly she had a certain dark beauty, of a bold, abandoned type.

“Come right in,” she directed.  “Mind your head, Lucy.”

The quartette filed through into a carpeted corridor, and Mrs. Sin reclosed the false back of the cupboard, which, viewed from the other side, proved to be a door fitted into a recess in the corridor of the adjoining house.  This recess ceased to exist when a second and heavier door was closed upon the first.

“You know,” murmured Kilfane, “old Sin Sin has his uses, Lola.  Those doors are perfectly made.”

“Pooh!” scoffed the woman, with a flash of her dark eyes; “he is half a ship’s carpenter and half an ape!”

She moved along the passage, her arm linked in that of Sir Lucien.  The others followed, and: